Word Play

I apologize for the alarming paucity of book reviews around here lately. I hate to admit that I only read four books between Thanksgiving and New Years. And actually two of those were audiobooks, which means I only read two real books in a whole month! It's so embarassing! Ah well, what can I say...the sugar high induced by my unending consumption of Christmas cookies apparently precluded any sort of attention span for books.

But it's a new year, and my resolution was to eat less sugary stuff, so hopefully there will be a few more book reviews and a few less cookie recipes in the near future! Although I do have about eight pounds of chocolate chips in my freezer...so we'll see.

One of the two books I read in December was Word Play, by Peter Farb. Word Play is an intelligent (but still fun) look at how people talk. Basically adhering to Chomsky's universal grammar theory, this book discusses the way that children learn languages, the similarity between all languages, and why humans are the only creatures that have a real 'language'. I particularly liked the chapter on paralanguage and the section that discusses how 'baby talk' in the majority of the world's languages is very similar. The chapter on "black" english and how it is essentially a separate dialect from "standard" english was also very interesting.

I also was struck by Farb's explanation that about half of all conversation is actually made up by pauses, so silence has a much more important role than we think it does in our speech. He mentions that actually 'chatterboxes' don't talk more, they just pause less than the average person. So to all of you who may have referred to me as "Motor Mouth" or "Talkica" in my youth--I am vindicated! You all just pause too much!

This excerpt on baby-naming from Word Play was one of my favorite sections, and gives you a good sense of Farb's intellectual yet approachable (and sometimes inadvertently funny) style of writing:

"...the style of giving names to children, which in most American speech communities is quite standardized. A child is usually given the first name of a parent or grandparent, the family name of the mother or some ancestor, or one of a limited number of quite common names like Thomas, Richard, Harold, Jane, Carol, or Elizabeth. But in certain speech communites in the South and Midwest, where most of the members belong to fundamentalist Protestant sects, the style is to bestow curious, folksy, or amusing first names--not as nicknames but as official birth-certificate names."

Farb then goes on to give examples of "this curious style of child-naming" such as Honey Combs, Coeta, Phalla, Buzz Buzz, Nicy, Sugie, Dilly, Skeety, Quince, Prince, Earl, Orlando, Tennessee, Savannah, Paris, Oleander, Fawn, Charme, and Rose Bud. And (this is the part I love) he finishes by saying, "When name-giving is not a part of the sacrament of {infant} baptism--and consequently a clergyman with a sense of decorum has no say--individual style may run wild, as it often does in areas of the United States where members belonging to these Protestant sects are concentrated."

I feel that Peter Farb would find most names given nowadays decidedly indecorous! But this books makes for a good read, as long as you can get past the dated examples of slang, and the references to the unportability of computers. For a book written 35 years ago though it's still remarkably applicable and a fun introduction to language development if you haven't read much in this genre.